Modern Masters Reading Series

In the most basic sense, a reading series allows us to hear the work of writers who are currently writing. It gives voice to modern texts, allows writers to provide anecdotal context and for us to enjoy hearing poetry, fiction, nonfiction in the voice of the writer who wrote it. It is an entirely different enterprise than reading a story, poem or essay silently to one’s self. A reading series elevates the text heard to a group “experience.”

The taproot of any reading series is the fact that the origin of literature is oral. Last but not least, a reading series is a reminder to all of the value of what it means to actually listen, it is an opportunity to practice the art of listening.

2016-2017 Schedule

All readings are free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may require special services should contact Disability Support Services at 410.617.2062 at least 48 hours prior to the event.

Spring 2017

Kevin Young: Reading
Monday, April 3rd, 5p.m. McManus Theater

Kevin Young is the new Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently, Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), long-listed for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011); and Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008). His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Young's nonfiction book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf, 2012) won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the editor of several collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). The former curator of Literary Collections & the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing & English, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2016.

Lorrie Moore: Reading
Thursday, April 20th, 5p.m. McManus Theater

Lorrie Moore is the author of three novels and four story collections including, Like Life, Birds Of America and most recently, Bark (2014). Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harperʼs, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Yale Review , Best American Short Stories , and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of The Irish Times Prize for International Literature, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award, the O.Henry Award, and a Lannan fellowship. Her most recent novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner and the Orange Prize. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has taught at Cornell University, the University of Michigan, NYU, Princeton University, Baruch College and for 29 years at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. She grew up in upstate New York and received her B.A. from St. Lawrence in 1978.

Fall 2016

Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Friday, October 28th, 5 p.m., McGuire Hall

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Jamieson's research areas include political communication, rhetorical theory and criticism, studies of various forms of campaign communication, and the discourse of the presidency. She is the author or co-author of 15 books including: Presidents Creating the Presidency (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford, 2008) and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (Random House, 2007). Jamieson has won university-wide teaching awards at each of the three universities at which she has taught, and political science or communication awards for four of her books. Her book, co-authored with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy, The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Messages Shaped the 2008 Election, received the 2010 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the area of government and politics. This event is sponsored by a grant from the Center for Humanities with additional support from Messina.